Today’s hike turned out considerably differently than expected. The plan was to hike the Cottonwood Meadows trail from the southern trailhead – go up the trail to the northern trailhead and turn around and come back down. We encountered a trail that is in need of quite a bit of maintenance and it altered our plans for the day.

We headed out at our usual time and decided to hike from the south so we would be coming downhill at the end of the day, which is always a bit easier. It is also a shorter drive to the southern trailhead as well. Since they closed the 4631 road (not sure why, it was open recently – guessing it has something to do with the fire camp that is in Ripplebrook), we headed back and took the 4630 road from a bit further north – I’d never driven that road before. We drove the 4630 road to the point where it joined the pipeline road (I had always thought pipeline road coming from Three Lynx was 4630 but I guess technically those roads were all spur roads off 4630). Once on 4630, we got stopped near the Oak Grove work center – they were cutting trees near the road and we had to wait until they felled a tree before we could continue. After that, we continued up 4630 to 4635 and then headed up 4635 to the 120 spur which is what leads to the lower trailhead. While there was some downed logs across the road, they had all been cut so we made it without having to cut any logs off the road. It did not look like anyone had been up there in a while, however.

We suited up and headed out. This is what the Southern Trailhead looked like – it is steep at the very beginning:

We started up the trail, which was somewhat indistinct – we soon realized we really should be doing a bit of clearing – it wasn’t long before I decided to go back to the truck and get my loppers – we really had not intended to do much in the way of maintenance on this trip, but the trail was in pretty bad shape, so we started doing a lot of cutting and lopping to clear the route. There were quite a few logs down, but this one was pretty large:

I looked back at my last trip from 2021 and found I took a picture of the same log:

We were not making good time at all due to all the maintenance we were doing. When the trail gets into deeper woods, it got a little better and we stopped doing so much work. We knew if we continued at the pace we were going, we weren’t going to get very far. We only did minimal clearing from that point. The trail improved quite a bit, although there was still quite a few logs and a lot of sticks and branches on the trail. My recollection of this portion of he trail was that it was in pretty good shape, but I guess with no maintenance for years, and very little foot traffic, it just kind of slowly degrades. This is a photo from 2015 showing the lower section of tread, which looks REALLY good to my eye and it is how I remembered it – it did not look nearly this good today:

We continued up the trail – it didn’t get much better, or much worse, until we got close to where it meets the end of the the 5830-265 road – at that point, we encountered a VERY dense rhodie thicket – it was very difficult to go thru, and it was wet from the recent rains:

We kind of expected it was going to be that thick until we got up to the road, and at that point we re-evaluated our choices. We looked at the map and thought if we could backtrack a bit back into the big timber and then head uphill to the 5830-025 spur road we could head up that and maybe do at least a bit of the upper portion of the trail.

We turned around and found what looked to be a not too bad route uphill. It was pretty difficult as we kept running into rhodies and vine maple. At some point, we found a rockslide that had a few trees in it, but was reasonably easy (other than the steepness) to go thru. It was at some point in that rockslide that we decided to stop for lunch. I think it was almost 1:00 by this point and we were hungry. This was our view at lunch, looking east:

We stopped and ate lunch. The bugs weren’t too bad. After a bit, we continued our climb up this hillside. It got a bit tougher as we went, but we soon encountered a road – it was a rough road – we thought it might have been the 025 spur but it apparently was an un-mapped skid road or something. We continued up the hill and soon encountered another road which was a lot more defined. Thinking it was the 025 spur, we headed north but it seemed to end, so we turned around and headed south. The road was easy walking and seemed to get better as we went. It wasn’t long before we found a switchback in the road and it headed back north. Soon, we got to another junction where another road headed south – we didn’t take that one, but there were fresh tire tracks at this junction, so we were guessing this was near the end of the 5830 road. We continued hiking up the road. At some point, we heard a vehicle coming down the road – it was a van. We grabbed the dogs and let him pass and continued hiking up the road. It was probably 2:00 or so by now – we decided to hike up the road to the northern trailhead and then hike the trail back down. We were hoping we’d have enough time to do it all.

We soon got to the northern trailhead and headed south. The trail is in kind of rough shape as it is very brushy (lots of huckleberries overgrowing the tread) and a fair number of logs across the trail. It then heads into the first meadow, which is pretty large and is dry this time of year:

We walked across the meadow and struggled a bit with where you re-enter the woods on the opposite side of the meadow. There used to be flags to help you find it, but they were gone.

We soon found where it re-entered the meadow and we continued along the trail – it is difficult to follow due to all the brush, but we were able to mostly follow it. The trail starts heading downhill and then crosses an old un-mapped road (it looks like that road might come off the 5830 road about a half mile north). After crossing the road, it soon heads back into old timber and winds its way down a hill until you pop out into the second meadow:

On the opposite side of all that brush is an un-named lake, but I’ve called it Cot Lake since it feeds Cot Creek:

The trail follows the west side of the lake/meadow. Part of it isn’t too hard to follow but at some point it re-enters the woods and we apparently missed the correct spot. We finally found the trail again but just like prior areas it was a bit tough to follow in places and there were quite a few logs down. It was somewhere in here that we found a boat on our trip in 2015. Hard to believe that was 9 years ago!

We successfully navigated around the lake and continued south. The trail enters a very narrow “meadow” with a wash that comes down the edge of it which is what the trail basically follows. A bit farther along, you pop out onto the third meadow:

It was pretty buggy here – lots of mosquitoes. I wanted to fly my drone to get a nice aerial of the meadows. As I was getting it setup, Kirk noticed some smoke to the west. I decided to fly my drone over to see if we could see what it was. We were almost positive it was a campfire (even though they were banned at this point). You can see the smoke rising in the distance:

I flew over and couldn’t see much, but the smoke would kind of come and go – like a campfire. The battery was running low, so I brought it back and put another battery in and the tried to get some aerial footage of the meadows.

Drone video:

It was getting late and we still had to negotiate the lower portion of the trail, which we weren’t sure what we were getting ourselves into and we had to complete he cross country portion of the hike across the cut area south of the 5830-240 spur. I packed up and we continued south, soon getting to the 5830-240 spur. We decided to head back into the uncut timber as it looked like easier walking. It was at some point in the old timber that Kirk saw this really interesting white fern – never seen one before like this:

We continued going south, looking for the path of least resistance – some day I’d really like to lop out and flag a nice route thru this area – I never seem to go thru this area the same way twice. We eventually made it down to the 5830-258 spur and walked the road down to the 265 spur and started down the trail. The beginning of this end of the trail wasn’t too bad – we did a little lopping here and there but at some point we got to a HUGE vine maple thicket that was TOTALLY grown over the tread. We spent a fair amount of time hacking this out and cleared the route thru there. After that vine maple thicket there were more rhodies to cut thru, but it wasn’t too far before we got to the thick rhodies that made us turn around earlier in the day. We spent a while cutting this section out and were soon back on reasonably good tread- certainly a lot better than we had had for quite a while! At this point, we stopped doing any maintenance and just walked the trail back. It was kind of nice to enjoy the work we had done earlier.

We got back to the truck just before 6:00 and headed out. We were both pretty tired – we stopped at Time Travelers for a well deserved beer and a burger.

We really need to spend a day or two (or three) on this trail to work on it! It is a very interesting trail that deserves to be kept passable.